Do cook stoves burning natural gas (some dare call it “methane”) cause childhood asthma? Some climate activists, bent on removing gas from the nation’s fuel mix from kitchen stoves to power plants claim that science establishes a connection between the fire under the frying pan and the scourge of asthma in kids.
The case appears to be scientifically hyperbolic: much ado about very little.
The issue wouldn’t be grabbing attention but for a case of political foot-in-mouth disease by a Democratic member of the Consumer Product Safety Commission, Richard Trumka Jr., son of the late head of the AFL-CIO Richard Trumka (1949-2021). Trumka Jr., 36, a lawyer like his late father, was a staffer on the House Oversight and Reform Committee’s subcommittee on economic and consumer policy before Biden named him to the consumer watchdog agency. According to his CPSC bio, he “focused his consumer protection and public health work on protecting children.”
In a January 9 interview with Bloomberg, Trumka got way ahead of his agency, suggesting that the CPSC was on the verge of banning new gas cook stoves. “This is a hidden hazard,” he said. “Any option is on the table. Products that can’t be made safe can be banned.”
Oops! The White House quickly shot down the idea; Trumka did a backtracking fandango. No, the Biden administration and the CPSC are not coming for your gas stove, or new gas stoves. Not even on the regulatory horizon. Heavens forfend.
Of course, right Republicans, assisted by house organ Fox News, quickly asserted that the administration is lying and plans to take away your stove, followed, no doubt, by your guns. Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page assured readers, “Rest easy, the Biden administration says. No such raids are planned to snatch your stove or any other home appliances. But to some influencers, particularly of the right-wing persuasion, the rumor itself was too tantalizing to be encumbered by anything so quaint and tiresome as facts.”
Trumka based his statements on a recent article (cited as “peer reviewed,” as if that made it holy scripture) in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health. The four-page article said it found that around 12% “of current childhood asthma in the US is attributable to gas stove use.” Pay attention to the wording. It didn’t use the more careful term “caused by,” instead substituting an unscientific waffle: “attributable to.”
One of the co-authors, Brady Seals, told E&E News, “We were never saying that gas stoves cause asthma, we always say that they are associated with asthma, because that’s what the meta-analysis says, and that’s the data we have.” That’s correlation.
When I worked at the National Institutes of Health in the 1970s, I became friends with the late Marvin Schneiderman (1919-1978), one of the giants of early epidemiology. He told me, “Epidemiology is hard. It isn’t just numbers.” It’s about distinguishing between correlation and causation. In the 1980s, for example, there was hullabaloo about cancer clusters and the nearby presence of chemical companies. When epidemiologists looked carefully, they couldn’t find causation, only correlation. According to the National Cancer Institute, “Because cancer is a relatively common disease, cases of cancer can appear to cluster even when there is no connection among them. That is, clusters of cancer can arise by chance.
“Some cancer clusters have been shown through careful investigation to be the result of a specific cancer-causing substance in the environment. However, such findings are extremely rare.”
The article Trumka cited is a “meta-analysis” of the publications reporting on research done by others, in some cases a meta-analysis of other meta-analyses. A Wikipedia article flags “methodological problems with meta-analysis. If individual studies are systematically biased due to questionable research practices (e.g., data dredging, data peeking, dropping studies) or the publication bias at the journal level, the meta-analytic estimate of the overall treatment effect may not reflect the actual efficacy of a treatment. Meta-analysis has also been criticized for averaging differences among heterogeneous studies because these differences could potentially inform clinical decisions.”
There is also reason to doubt the motives of the article Trumka relied on. The lead author, Talon Gruenwald, works for the Rocky Mountain Institute, an environmental organization biased against natural gas. RMI’s website says, “RMI decarbonizes energy systems through rapid, market-based change in the world’s most critical geographies to align with a 1.5°C future and address the climate crisis. We work with businesses, policymakers, communities and other organizations to identify and scale energy system interventions that will cut greenhouse gas emissions at least 50% by 2030.” While many will regard that as a laudable ambition, it does suggest an inherent bias in the study. He has no medical credentials.
Seals is also a staffer at RMI, with no background in epidemiology. The third author, Luke D. Knibbs, is an Australian epidemiologist who has worked on research linking ambient air pollution and cognitive development in children. The fourth author, H. Dean Hosgood III, is an epidemiologist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, studying cancers and environmental exposure.
While the case that gas stoves cause childhood asthma is not made, oxides of nitrogen from gas stoves may trigger symptoms in kids that already have asthma, according to Ben Nelson, pediatric pulmonologist at Mass General Hospital. Yahoo reported, “Nelson stresses that doesn’t mean that gas stoves cause childhood asthma. The most common factors for whether a child will develop asthma include a family history of asthma, allergies, respiratory problems during infancy and childhood, exposure to secondhand smoke, air pollution and having obesity, according to the American Lung Association (ALA).”
“Patients with asthma have different triggers and responses to those triggers,” Nelson says. “There’s no way for me to say that every patient with asthma will be exacerbated by exposure to a gas stove. It’s even harder for me to say what your symptoms will be if you have asthma and you are exposed to a gas stove.”
Another problem with the paper is that it isn’t rigorous research that controls for “confounders,” background aspects that can bias results. A classic example is the furor over radon pollution in home foundations in the 1980s, which many, including the Environmental Protection Agency, claimed caused lung cancer. Millions were spent on radon remediation.
The radon-lung cancer connection was based on 1950s studies of New Mexico uranium miners. David Rall (1926-1999), National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences director, told me in the late 1980s, the uranium miner studies didn’t control for cigarette smoking. The vast majority of the miners were smokers. Radon didn’t cause their lung cancer.
Khalil Savary, pediatric pulmonologist at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, commented to Yahoo: “This is a public health paper — it’s not a double-blinded, placebo-controlled study that said gas stoves cause asthma. Correlation does not equal causation.” Savary says the paper seems to determine that gas stoves are prevalent and asthma rates seem to be higher in areas where gas stoves are common. “But they’re not controlling for things like allergies to mold and other factors you commonly find in multi-family living.”
–Kennedy Maize
To subscribe to The Quad Report, click on the email link above and write “subscribe” in the subject line, and I’ll take it from there.
To comment, use the email link above.